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CHARLES SITMNEB 

.A. EULOGY, 

o v 

By GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE LEGISLATURE OP MASSACHUSETTS, 

IN THE BOSTON MUSIC IIALL, ON THE 9tii OF JUNE, 1S74. 



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CHAELES STJMKEK. 



The prayer is said — the dirge is sung; 
from the Avaters of the Bay to the hills 
of Berkshire the funeral hells of the Com- 
monwealth have tolled ; the Congress of the 
United States, of which he was the oldest 
memher in continuous service, has in hoth 
Houses spoken his praises — no voice more 
eloquent than that of his opponents ; the 
race to whose elevation his life was conse- 
crated has hewailed him with filial grati- 
tude ; this city, his hirth- place and his 
home, has proudly mourned its illustrious 
citizen ; the pulpit and the press every 
where in the land have hlended sorrow and 
admiration ; and now his native State, with 
all its honored magistracy — the State which 
gave him his great opportunity, clothing his 
words with the majesty of Massachusetts, so 
that when he spoke it was not the voice of 
a man, hut of a commonwealth — lamenting 
a son so beloved, a servant so faithful, a 
friend so true, comes last of all to say 
farewell, and to deliver the character and 
career of Charles Sumner to history and the 
judgment of mankind. I know how amply, 
how eloquently, how tenderly, the story of 
his life has been told. In this place you 
heard it in words that spoke for the culture 
and the conscience of the country — for the 
prosperous and happy. And yonder in Fan- 
euil Hall his eulogy fell from lips that must 
•always glow when they mention him — lips 
that spoke for the most wronged and most 
unfortunate in the land, who never saw the 
face of Sumner, hut whose children's chil- 
dren will bless his name forever. I might 
w r ell hesitate to stand here if I did not know 
that, enriched by your sympathy, my words, 
telling the same tale, will seem to your gen- 
erous hearts to prolong for a moment the 
requiem that you would not willingly let 
die. 

Nor think the threefold strain superflu- 
ous. How well this universal eulogy — 
these mingling voices of various nativity, 
but all American — befits a man whose aims 
and efforts were universal ; whom neither a 
city, nor a State, nor a party, nor a nation, 
nor a race bound with any local limitation ! 
On a lofty hill overlooking the lake of Ca- 
yuga, in New York, stands a noble tree, 
in the grounds of the Cornell University, 
under which an Oxford scholar, choosing 
America for his home because America is 
the home of Liberty, has placed a seat 
upon which he has carved, "Above all na- 
tions is Humanity." That is the legend which 



Charles Sumner carved upon his heart, and 
sought to write upon the hearts of his fel- 
low-citizens and of the world. And if at this 
moment my voice should suddenly sink into 
silence, I can believe that this hall would 
thriH and murmur with the last words he 
ever publicly spoke in Massachusetts, stand- 
ing on this very spot: "Nor would I have 
my country forget at any time, in the dis- 
charge of its transcendent duties, that, since 
the rule of conduct and of honor is the same 
for nations as for individuals, the greatest 
nation is thatwhich does mostfor humanity." 

Amidst the general sorrow Massachusetts 
mourns him by the highest right, for with 
all the grasp of his hope and his cosmopoli- 
tan genius, perhaps for those very reasons, 
he was essentially a Massachusetts man. 
And here I touch the first great influence 
that moulded your Senator. This is the 
Puritan State, and the greatness of Sumner 
was the greatness of the Puritan genius — 
the greatness of moral power. Learning 
and culture and accomplishment; aesthetic 
taste and knowledge ; the grace of society ; 
the scholar's rich resource in travel ; illus- 
trious friendships in every land ; the urban- 
ity and charm of a citizen of the world — all 
these he had; all these you know; yet all 
these were but the velvet in which the iron 
Puritan hand was clad — the Puritau hand 
which in other days had smitten kings and 
dynasties hip and thigh; had saved, civil 
and religious liberty in England ; had swept 
the Mediterranean of pirates ; had avenged 
the Lord's 

" slaughtered saints, whose bones 

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;" 

the Puritan hand which, reaching out across 
the sea, sterner than the icy sternness of the 
New England shore, grasped a new conti- 
nent, and wrought the amazing miracle of 
America. 

The Puritan spirit, in the larger sense, 
enriched with many nationalities, broader, 
more generous, more humane, is the mas- 
ter influence of American civilization, and 
among all our public men it has no type so 
satisfactory and complete as Charles Sum- 
ner. He was the son of Massachusetts. By 
the fruit let the tree be judged. The State 
to whose hard coast the Mayflower came, and 
upon whose rocks it dropped its seed — the 
State in which the mingled Puritan and 
Pilgrim spirit has been most active — is to- 
day the chief of commonwealths. It is the 
community in which the average of well-be- 



mg is liiglier than in any state we know in 
history. Puritan in origin though it be, it 

is more truly liberal and free than any simi- 
lar community in the world. The fig and the 
pomegranate and the almond will not grow 
there, nor the nightingale sing, but nobler 
blossoms of the old human stock than its 
most famous children the sun never shone 
upon ; nor has the liberty-loving heart of 
man heard sweeter music than the voices 
of James Otis and Samuel Adams, of John 
Adams and Joseph Warren, of Josiah Quiucy 
and Charles Sumner. Surely I may say so, 
born in the State that Roger Williams found- 
ed — Roger Williams, the prophet whom Mas- 
sachusetts stoned. 

Into this State and these influences 
Charles Sumner was born sixty-three years 
ago, while as yet the traditions of colonial 
New England were virtually unchanged. 
Here were the town-meeting, the constable, 
the common school, the training-day, the 
general intelligence, the morality, the habit 
of self-government, the homogeneity of pop- 
ulation, the ample territory, the universal in- 
stinct of law. Here was the full daily prac- 
tice of what De Tocqueville afterward called 
the two or three principal ideas which form 
the basis of the social theory of the United 
States, and which seemed to make a republic 
possible, practicable, and wise. It was one 
of the good fortunes of Sumner's life that, 
born amidst these influences, he used to the 
utmost the advantage of school and college. 
To many men youth itself is so sweet a 
siren that in hearing her song they forget 
all but the pleasure of listening to it. But 
the sibyl saved no scroll from Sumner; he 
had the wisdom to seize them all. His 
classmates, gayly returning late at night, 
saw the studious light shining in his win- 
dow. The boy was hard at work, already 
in those plastic years storing his mind and 
memory, which seemed indeed an •'inability 
to forget," with the literature and historic 
lore which gave his later discourse such am- 
plitude and splendor of illustration that, like 
a royal robe, it was stiff and cumbrous and 
awkward with exaggerated richness of em- 
broidery. He never lost this vast capacity 
of work, and his life had no idle hours. Long 
afterward, when he was in Paris, recovering 
from the blow in the Senate, ordered not to 
think or read, and daily, as his physician 
lately tells us, undergoing a torture of treat- 
ment which he refused to mitigate by anaes- 
thetics, simply unable to do nothing, he de- 
voted himself to the study and collection 
of engravings, in which he became an ex- 
pert. And I remember in the midsummer 
of 1871, when he remained, as was his cus- 
tom, in Washington, after the city was de- 
serted by all but its local population, and 
when I saw him daily, that he rose at seven 
in the morning, and with but a slight break- 
fast at nine, sat at his desk in the library 
hard at work until five in tho afternoon. 
It was his vacation : the weather was trop- 
ical ; ai d lie was sixty years old. The re- 



nowned Senator at his post was still tho 
solitary midnight student of the college. 

But other influences mingled in his edu- 
cation, and helped to mould the man. While 
his heart burned with the tale of Plutarch's 
heroes, with the story of ancient states, and 
the politics of Greece and Rome and modern 
Europe, he lived in this historic city, and 
was therefore familiar with many of the 
most inspiring scenes of our American story. 
I know not if the people of this neighbor- 
hood are always conscious of the hallowed 
ground upon which they daily tread. We 
who come hither from other States, pil- 
grims to the cradle of American independ- 
ence, are moved by emotions such as we can 
not elsewhere feel. Here is the " Old South" 
Meeting-house — and here may it long re- 
main ! — where, however changed, still in 
imagination Sam Adams calls the Sons of 
Liberty to their duty. There is the old 
State-house where James Otis, with electric 
eloquence, brings a continent to its feet. Be- 
neath is the ground where Crispus Attucks 
fell. Beyond is Faneuil Hall, the plainest 
and most reverend political temple now 
standing in the world, and upon the prin- 
ciples which are its inseparable traditions 
has been founded the most humane republic 
in history. There is the Old North steeple, 
on which Paul Revere's lantern lights the 
land to independence. Below is the water 
on which the scarlet troops of Percy and of 
Howe glitter in the June sunshine of ninety- 
nine years ago ; and lo ! memorial of a battle 
lost and a cause won, the tall gray melan- 
choly shaft on Bunker Hill rises — rises " till 
it meets the sun in his coming, while the 
earliest light of morning gilds it, and part- 
ing day lingers and plays on its summit." 

These scenes, as well as his books and col- 
lege, were the school of Sumner ; and as tho 
tall and awkward youth, dreaming of Mar- 
athon and Arbela, of Sempach and Morgarten, 
walked on Bunker Hill, and his eyes wan- 
dered over peaceful fields and happy towns 
to Coucord and Lexington, doubt not that 
the genius of his native land whispered to 
him that all knowledge and the highest 
training and the purest purpose were but 
the necessary equipment of the ambition 
that would serve in any way a country 
whose cause in his own day, as in the day 
of Bunker Hill, was the cause of human 
nature. Charles Sumner was an educated 
man, a college-bred man, as all the great 
revolutionary leaders of Massachusetts were ; 
and he knew, as every intelligent man knows, 
that from the day when Themistocles led the 
educated Athenians at Salamis to that when 
Von Moltke marshaled the educated Germans 
against France, the sure foundations of states 
are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance, and 
that every sneer at education, at cultivation, 
at book-learning, which is the recorded wis- 
dom of the experience of mankind, is the 
demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, in- 
viting national degeneration and ruin. 
Sumner was soon at the Law School the 



favorite pupil of that accomplished magis- 
trate Judge Story, the right-hand of Mar- 
shall, to whom iu difficult momeuts the great 
Webster turned for law. But the character 
of his legal studies when, a little later, he 
was lecturing at the Law School — for he 
spoke chiefly of constitutional law and the 
law of nations — showed even then the bent 
of his feeling, the vague reaching out to- 
ward the future, the first faint hints and 
foreshowings of his own ultimate career. 
Could it have been revealed to him in that 
modest lecture-room at Cambridge as he was 
unfolding to a few students the principles 
of international law, which in its full glory 
he believed to be nothing less than the sci- 
ence of the moral relations of states to each 
other, that one day in the Senate of the 
United States, and in its chief and most 
honorable place, he should plead for the 
practical application of the principles which 
he cherished, a recognized authority, and 
himself one of the lawgivers whom he had 
described as the reformers of nations and the 
builders of human society, how well might 
he have seen that culmination of his career 
as the most secret hope of his heart fulfilled ! 
But again, as he stood there, could he have 
seen as in a vision that one day also he should 
stand in that Senatorial arena in deadly con- 
flict with crime against humanity — a con- 
flict that shook the continent and arrested 
the world — and as a general upon the bat- 
tle-field marshals all his forces, holding his 
swift and glittering lines in hand — his squad- 
rons and regiments and artillery, his skir- 
mishers and reserves, massing and dispers- 
ing at his supreme will, and at last, snatch- 
ing all his force, hurls it at the foe in one 
blasting bolt of fire and victory — so he, in 
that other and greater field, should gath- 
er up all the accumulated resources of his 
learning, all the training of the law, all the 
deep instincts and convictions of his con- 
science, and hurl them in one blazing and 
resistless mass in the very forefront of that 
mighty debate that flamed into civil war, 
melting four millions of chains, and regen- 
erating a nation — could all this have been re- 
vealed to him, I doubt if he could have pre- 
pared himself for the great part that he was 
to play with more conscience or more care. 

Then to the influences that made the man 
was added a residence in Europe. He re- 
turned a polished cosmopolitan ; a learned 
youth who had sat upon the bench in West- 
minster Hall, and taught the judges the rul- 
ings of their own courts ; who had mingled 
on equal terms in the bouts of lettered wit, 
no longer at the Mermaid, but at Holland 
House, and the breakfast-rooms of accom- 
plished scholars in London and Paris and Ber- 
lin and Koine. He returned knowing almost 
every man and woman of renown in Europe, 
and he brought back what he carried away 
— a stainless purity of life and loftiness of 
aim, the habit of incessant work, which was 
the law of his being, and the tastes of a j urist, 
but not those of a practicing lawyer. His 



look, his walk, his dress, his manner, were 
not those of the busy advocate, but of the 
cultivated and brilliant man of society — the 
Admirable C'richton of the saloons. He was 
oftener seen in the refined circles of the city, 
in the libraries and dining-rooms of Prescott 
and Quincy, of Bancroft and Ticknor, than 
in the courts of law. Distinguished foreign- 
ers, constantly arriving, brought him letters, 
and he took them to the galleries and the 
college. But while he sauntered, he studied. 
In his office he was diligently editing great 
works of law ; not practicing at the bar, for, 
indeed, he was not formed for a jury lawyer, 
where the jury was less than a nation, or 
mankind. The electric agility, the consum- 
mate tact, the readiness for every resource, 
the humor that brightens or withers, the 
command of the opposite point of view, the 
superficial ardor, the facility of simulation 
that makes the worse appear the better rea- 
son, the passionate gust and sweep of elo- 
quent appeal — these were lacking, and want- 
ing these, he did not seek the laurels of the 
jury advocate. Sumner's legal mind at this 
time, and throughout his life, was largely 
moulded, trained to the contemplation of 
great principles and to lofty research. As 
one of his admiring comrades, himself a re- 
nowned lawyer, says of him, "In sporting 
terms, he had a good eye for country, but 
no scent for a trail." The movement of his 
mind was grand and comprehensive. He 
spoke naturally, not in subtle and dextrous 
pleas, but in stately and measured orations. 
When he returned from Europe he was 
thought to have been too much fascinated 
by England, and throughout his life it was 
sometimes said that he was still in thralled 
by his admiration for that country. But 
what is more natural to an American than 
love of England ? Does not Hawthorne in- 
stinctively call it "Our old Home?" The 
Pilgrims came to plant a purer England, and 
their children, the colonists, took up arms 
to maintain a truer England, but an England 
still. They became independent, but they 
did not renounce their race nor their lan- 
guage, and their victory left them the ad- 
vanced outpost of English political progress 
and civilization. The principles that wo 
most proudly maintain to-day, those to 
which Sumner's whole life was devoted, are 
English traditions. The great muniments 
of individual liberty in every degree de- 
scended to us from our fathers. The Com- 
monwealth, justice as the political corner- 
stone, the rule of the constitutional majori- 
ty, the habeas corpus, the trial by jury, free- 
dom of speech and of the press — these are 
English, and they are ours. I do not agree 
with the melancholy Fisher Ames that " the 
immortal spirit of the wood-nymph Liberty 
dwells only in the English oak ;" but the 
most patriotic American may well remember 
that individual freedom sometimes seems 
almost surer and sturdier in England than 
here, and may wisely repair to drink at 
those elder fountains. No Englisl man in 



this generation has more influenced the 
thought of his country than John Stuart 
Mill, and the truest American will find upon 
his heroic pages gleams of a fairer and am- 
pler America than ever in visiou even Sam- 
uel Adams saw. No, uo. Plymouth Rock 
was hut a stepping-stone from one continent 
to another iu the great march of the same 
historic development, and to-day, with elec- 
tric touch, -we grasp the hand of England 
under the sea that the tumult of the ocean 
may not toss us further asunder, but throb 
as the beating of one common heart. Is it 
strange, then, that the young lawyer whose 
deepest instinct was love of freedom, and 
■whose youth had been devoted to the study 
of that uoble science whose highest purpose 
is to defend individual right, after long resi- 
dence in the land of John Selden, of Coke, 
of Mansfield, of Blackstone, of Romilly, as 
well as of Shakespeare and Bacon, of New- 
ton and Jeremy Taylor — a laud which had 
appealed in every way to his heart, his 
mind, his imagination, whose history had 
inspired, whose learning had armed him to 
be a liberator of the oppressed — should al- 
ways have, turned with admiration to the 
country " where," as her laureate sings — 

" Where freedom broadens slowly down 
From precedent to precedent?" 

Such were the general influences that 
moulded the young Sumner. But to what 
a situation iu his own country he returned! 
— a situation neither understood nor sus- 
pected by the fastidious and elegant circles 
which received him. The man never lived 
who enjoyed more or was more fitted to en- 
joy the higher delights of human society 
than Sumner, or who might have seemed to 
those who scanned his habits and his tastes 
so little adapted for the heroic part. Could 
the scope and progress and culmination of 
the great contest which had already begun 
have been foreseen and measured, Charles 
Sumner would probably have been selected 
as the type of the cultivated and scholarly 
gentleman who would recoil from the con- 
flict as Sir Thomas Browne shunned the 
stern tumult of the Great Rebellion. 

In speaking of that conflict I shall speak 
plainly ; I hope to speak truly. To turn to 
Mr. Sumner's public career is to open a chap- 
ter of our history written in fire and closed 
iu blood, but which we must be willing to 
recall if we would justly measure the man. 
Trained in his own expectation for other 
ends, framed for friendship, for gentleness, 
for professional and social ease, and the plac- 
id renown of letters, he was suddenly caught 
up into the stormy cloud, and his life be- 
came a strife that filled a generation. But 
during all that tremendous time, on the one 
hand enthusiastically trusted, on the other 
contemptuously scorned and hated, his heart- 
was that of a little child. He said no un- 
worthy word, he did no unmanly deed; dis- 
honor lied his face ; and to-day those who so 
long and so naturally hue so wrongfully be- 



lieved him their enemy strew rosemary for 
remembrance upon his grave. 

Down to the year ld30 the moral agita- 
tion against slavery in this country smoul- 
dered. But in that year Benjamin Lundy 
touched with fire the soul of William Lloyd 
Garrison, and that agitation burst out again 
i rre] ii essibly. You remember — who can for- 
get f — the passionate onset of the Aboli- 
tionists. It was conscience rising in insur- 
rection. They made their great appeal with 
the ardor of martyrs and the zeal of primi- 
tive Christians. Fifth-monarchy men, rant- 
ers, Anabaptists, were never more repugnant 
to their times than they, and they became 
the prey of the worst and most disorderly 
passions. The abolition missionaries were 
mobbed, imprisoned, maimed, murdered, but 
still, as in the bitter days of Puritan perse- 
cution in Scotland the undaunted voices of 
the Covenanters were heard singing hymns 
that echoed and re-echoed from peak to peak 
of the barren mountains until the great 
dumb wilderness was vocal with praise, so 
the solemn appeal of the Abolitionists to 
the Golden Rule and the Declaration of In- 
dependence echoed from solitary heart to 
heart until the land rang with the litany of 
liberty. In politics the discussion had been 
stamped out like a threatening fire upon the 
prairie whenever it arose. But soon after 
Mr. Sumner's return from Europe this, too, 
flamed out afresh iu the attempted annexa- 
tion of Texas. Early in 1845 the plan was 
consummated. Mr. Sumner was a Whig, but 
then and always he was above all a man. 
He was too well versed in the history of free- 
dom not to know that the great victories 
over despotism and slavery in every form 
had been won by uuited action, and he knew 
that united action implies organization and 
a party. But while great political results 
are to be gained by means of great parties, 
he knew that a party which is too blind to 
see or too cowardly to acknowledge the real 
issue, which pursues its ends, however noble, 
by ignoble means, which tolerates corrup- 
tion, which trusts unworthy men, which suf- 
fers the public service to be prostituted to per- 
sonal ends, defies reason and conscience, and 
summons all honest men to oppose it. When 
conscience goes, all goes ; and whercA'er con- 
science went, Charles Sumner followed. It 
took him out of those delightful drawing- 
rooms and tranquil libraries; it drew him 
away from old companions and cherished 
friends ; it exposed him to their suspicion, 
their hostility, their scorn ; it forbade him 
the peaceful future of his dreams and ex- 
pectations; it placed him at the fiery heart 
of the fiercest conflict of the century; it 
hedged his life with insults and threats and 
plots of assassination ; it bared his head to 
the dreadful blow that struck him seuseless 
to the Senate floor, and sent him a tortured 
wanderer beyond the sea; later it separated 
him from the co-operation of colleagues, and 
severed him from his party; and at last it 
exposed him, sick in body and in mind, to 



the blow that wounded his soul, the censure 
of his beloved Massachusetts. But he did 
not quail ; he did not falter ; he showed 
himself still to be her worthy son. Wherever 
conscience went, Charles Sumner followed. 
" God help me !" cried Martin Luther, " I can 
no other." "God help me!" said Charles 
Sumner, " I must do my duty." 

The Whigs are, or ought to be, he said, in 
1845, the party of freedom. But when they 
refused to recognize the real contest in the 
country by rejecting in their National Con- 
vention of 1848 the Wilmot Proviso, Mr. Sum- 
ner went with the other Conscience Whigs 
to Worcester, and organized the Free-soil 
party ; and when, in the winter of 1850-51, 
the Legislature of Massachusetts was to elect 
the successor of Daniel Webster in the Sen- 
ate of the United State, the Free-soil chiefs, 
as upright, able, and patriotic a body of po- 
litical leaders as ever Massachusetts had, 
deliberately selected Mr. Sumner as their 
candidate — a selection which showed the es- 
timate of the man by those who knew him 
most intimately, and who most thoroughly 
understood the times. He was young, strong, 
learned, variously accomplished, a miracle 
of industry, zealous, pure, of indomitable 
courage, and of supreme moral energy. But 
he had little political ambition, and in 1846 
had peremptorily declined to be a candidate 
for Congress. He was not a member of either 
of the great parties. He would not make 
any pledge of any kind, or move his tongue, 
or wink his eye, to secure success. He was 
pledged then and always and only to his 
sense of right. He stood for no partisan end 
whatever, but simply and solely for uncom- 
promising resistance to slavery. The con- 
test of the election was long ; it lasted for 
three months, and on the 24th of April, 1851, 
he was elected. " I accept," he said, " as the 
servant of Massachusetts, mindful of the sen- 
timents uttered by her successive Legisla- 
tures, of the genius which inspires her his- 
tory, and of the men, her perpetual pride 
and ornament, who breathed into her that 
breath of liberty which early made her an 
example to her sister States." How these 
lofty words lift us out of the grossness of pub- 
lic corruption and incapacity into the air of 
ideal states and public men ! What a state- 
ly summons are they to his beloved Massa- 
chusetts once more to take the lead, and 
again to guide her sister States to greater 
political purity and the ancient standards 
of public character and service ! 

The hour in which Mr. Sumner wrote 
those words, the hour of his entrance upon 
public life, was the darkest of our history. 
But if his mind had turned regretfully to 
that tranquil career of his earlier anticipa- 
tion, how well might his good genius have 
whispered to him what the flower of En- 
glish gentlemen and scholars had written 
three hundred years before, " To what pur- 
pose should our thoughts be directed to va- 
rious kinds of knowledge unless room be af- 
forded for putting it into practice, so that 



public advantage may be the result ?" Or 
that other strain, full of the music of a con- 
secrated soul, in which Philip Sidney writes 
to his father-in-law, Walsingham, " I think a 
wise and constant man ought never to grieve 
while he doth play, as a man may say, his 
own part truly." 

What, then, was the political situation 
when Mr. Sumner entered the Senate ? 
Slavery had apparently subdued the coun- 
try. Grand Juries in the Northern States 
presented citizens who in time of peace 
wished to discuss vital public questions as 
guilty of sedition. The Legislatures were 
summoned to make their speeches indicta- 
ble offenses. In the Legislature of Rhode 
Island such a bill was reported. The Gov- 
ernor of New York favored such a law. The 
Governor of Ohio delivered a citizen of that 
State to the authorities of another to be tried 
for helping a slave to escape. The Governor 
of Massachusetts said that all discussion of 
the subject which tended to incite insurrec- 
tion had been held to be indictable. Every 
great national office was then, and long had 
been, held by the ministers of slavery. The 
American embassadors in Europe were every 
where silent, or smoothly apologized. Every 
committee in Congress was the servant of 
slavery, and when the Vice-President left 
his seat in the Senate it was filled by another 
like himself. All the attendants who stood 
around him, the door-keej)ers, messengers, 
sergeants-at-arms, down to the very pages 
who noiselessly skimmed the floor, were se- 
lected by its agents. Beyond the superb walls 
of the Capitol, which Senator Benton had 
long solemnly warned the country was built 
by permission of that Supreme Power which 
would seize and occupy it when the time 
came, the whole vast system of national of- 
fices was within the patronage of slavery. 
Every little post-office, every custom-house 
clerkship, was a bribe to silence, while the 
Postmaster- General of the United States 
robbed the mails at its bidding. When Sum- 
ner entered the Senate the most absolute sub- 
serviency to slavery was decreed as the test of 
nationality, and that power did not hesitate 
to declare that any serious effort, however 
lawfully made, to change its policy would 
strike the tocsin of civil war. Meanwhile, at 
the very moment of his election, the horrors of 
the Fugitive Slave Law had burst upon thou- 
sands of inuocent homes. Mothers snatched 
their children and fled, they knew not whith- 
er. Brave men, long safe in recovered lib- 
erty, were seized for no crime but misfor- 
tune, and hurried to their doom. Young 
men and girls who had been always free, 
always residents of their own States, were 
kidnaped and sold. The auguish, the sub- 
lime heroism, of this ghastly persecution fills 
one of the most tragical and most inspiring 
epochs of our story. Even those who pub- 
licly sustained the law from a sense of duty 
secretly helped the flying fugitives upon their 
way. The human heart is stronger than 
sophistry. The man who impatiently ex- 



claimed that of course the law was hard, 
but it was the law, and must be obeyed, siid- 
denly felt the quivering, panting fugitive 
clinging to his knees, guilty of no crime, 
and begging only the succor which no hon- 
est heart would refuse a dog cowering upon 
his threshold ; and as he heard the dread 
power thundering at the door, "I am the 
Law, give me my prey !" in the same mo- 
ment he heard God knocking at his heart, 
" Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least 
of these my little ones, ye have done it unto 
me!" 

Those days are passed. That fearful con- 
flict is over; and the flowers just strewn all 
through these sorrowing States, indiscrimi- 
nately upon the graves of the blue and the 
gray, show how truly it is ended. Heaven 
knows I speak of it with no willingness, 
with no bitterness ; but how can I show you 
Charles Sumner if I do not show you the 
time that made him what he was ? This 
was the political and moral situation of the 
country when he took the oath as Senator, 
on the 1st of December, 1851. The famous 
political triumvirate of the former genera- 
tion was gone. Mr. Calhoun, the master-will 
of the three, had died in the previous year. 
Mr. Webster was Secretary of State ; and 
Henry Clay, with fading eye aud bowed frame 
and trembling voice — Henry Clay, Compro- 
mise incarnate — feebly tottered out of the 
chamber as Charles Sumner, Conscience in- 
carnate, came in. As he took the oath the 
new triumvirate was complete, for Mr. Sew- 
ard aud Mr. Chase had taken their seats two 
years before. For some months Mr. Sumner 
did not speak upon the great topic, and many 
of his frieuds at home thought him keeping 
silence too long, half fearing that he too had 
been enchanted by the woful Circe of the 
South. They did not know how carefully 
slavery prevented him from finding an op- 
portunity. A month before he could get 
the floor for his purpose, Theodore Parker 
said, in a public speech, " I wish he had 

spoken long ago But it is for him to 

decide, not for us. 'A fool's bolt is soon 
shot,' while a wise man often reserves his 
fire." At leugth, on the 26th of August, 
1852, after many efforts to be heard, Mr. 
Sumner obtained the floor, saying as he 
arose, "The subject is at last broadly be- 
fore the Senate, and by the blessing of God 
it shall be discussed." 

This first great speech upon the repeal of 
the Fugitive Slave Law was the most signif- 
icant event in the Senate since Mr. Webster's 
reply to Hayne, and an epitome of Mr. Sum- 
ner's whole public career. It was one of the 
words that are events, and from which his- 
torical epochs take their departure. These 
are strong words. See if they are justified. 
The slavery debate was certainly the most 
momentous that had ever occurred in the 
country, and brave words had been already 
uttered for freedom. The subtle and san- 
guine and sagacious Seward had spoken oft- 
en and wisely. The passionless Chase, with 



massive and Websterian logic, had pressed 
his solid reasoning home ; and the gay hu- 
mor of Hale had irradiated his earnest and 
strenuous appeals. But all of these men 
were known to their colleagues as members 
of parties, as politicians, as men of political 
ambition. With such elements and meu 
slavery was accustomed to deal. Carefully 
studying the Senator from New York, it saw, 
with the utmost purity of character, trained 
ability, acute political instinct, and partisan 
habit, the intellectual optimist who grasped 
the situation with his brain rather than with 
his heart and conscience. It tested him by 
its own terrible earnestness. It weighed 
him iu the balance of its own unquailiug 
and uncompromising resolution, and found 
him wanting. Do not misunderstand me. 
Mr. Seward was the only political leader 
for whom I have ever felt the admiring loy- 
alty which older men felt for Webster aud 
Calhoun and Clay. His career has been no- 
bly set forth by your own distinguished cit- 
izen, Mr. Adams, in his discourse before the 
Legislature of New York. And as he went 
to Albany to say what he believed to be the 
truth, so have I come hither. Slavery knew 
Mr. Seward to be accustomed to political 
considerations, to party necessities, to the 
claims of compromise. It knew the scope 
of his political philosophy, the brightness 
of his hope of American glory under the 
Union, the steady certainty of his trust that 
all would be well. Even if, like Webster 
and Calhoun and Clay, he saw the gath- 
ering storm, he thought — and he did not 
conceal his thought — that he had the confi- 
dence of his opponents, and could avert or 
control the tempest. Slavery knew that he 
could not. If he proudly declared the high- 
er law, slavery kuew that he did it, as Plato 
announced the Golden Rule, as a thinker, 
not as an actor; as a philosopher, not as 
the founder of a religion ready to be sealed 
with fire and blood. But this was the very 
spirit of slavery, and it did not see it to be 
his. 

In the midst of a speech which logically 
cut the ground from beneath the slave in- 
terest, and calmly foretold the blessing of 
the emancipation that was unavoidable, Mr. 
Seward would sometimes turn and hold out 
his fingers for a pinch of suuff toward some 
Southern Senator, who, turning away his 
face, offered him the box. When the Senate 
adjourned, Mr. Seward would perhaps join 
the same colleague to stroll home along the 
Avenue as if they had been country lawyers 
coming from a court where they had been 
arguing a dry point of law. It showed how 
imperfectly ho felt or how inadequately he 
measured the sullen intensity and relentless 
purpose of the spirit which dominated our 
politics, and would pause at nothing in its 
course. In a word, that spirit was essen- 
tially revolutionary, and Mr. Seward had 
not a revolutionary fibre in his being. Long 
afterward, when the movement of secession 
had begun, as he walked with a fellow-Sen- 



ator to the Capitol on the morning of Wash- 
ington's birthday, he saw on all sides the 
national flags fluttering in the sun, and ex- 
claimed to his companion, with triumphant 
incredulity, " Look there ! see those flags ! 
and yet they talk of disunion !" 

Up to the moment of Mr. Sumner's appear- 
ance in the Senate Mr. Seward had been the 
foremost antislavery leader in public life. 
But slavery, carefully studying him, be- 
lieved, as I think, that he would compro- 
mise. That was the test. If he would com- 
promise, he might annoy, but he was not 
to be feared. If he would compromise, he 
might melodiously sing the glory of the 
Union at his pleasure. If he would com- 
promise, he would yield. If he were not as 
invincibly resolute as slavery, he was al- 
ready conquered ; and he was the leader of 
the North. There sat Seward in the Senate 
— yes, and there Webster had sat, there Clay 
had sat, with all their great and memorable 
service ; there in its presiding chair Millard 
Fillmore had sat ; and over them all slavery 
had stalked straight on in its remorseless 
imperial career. And if, as Mr. Seward's 
most able eulogist mournfully remarks, he 
was permitted at last to leave public life 
" with fewer marks of recognition of his 
brilliant career than he would have had if 
he had been the most insignificant of our 
Presidents," may it not be that, without ques- 
tioning his generous character, his lofty abil- 
ity, and his illustrious service, there was a 
general feeling that in the last administra- 
tion under which he served he had seemed 
in some degree to justify the instinct of 
slavery, that his will was not as sternly in- 
exorable as its own ? 

I do not, of course, forget that compromise 
makes government possible, and that the 
Union was based upon it. "All govern- 
ment," says Burke, "is founded upon com- 
promise and barter But," he adds, "in 

all fair dealing the thing bought must bear 
some proportion to the purchase paid. None 
will barter away the immediate jewel of the 
soul." So Sir James Mackintosh said of 
Lord Somers, whom he described as the per- 
fect model of a wise statesman in a free 
community, that " to be useful he submitted 
to compromise with the evil that he could 
not extirpate." But it is the instinct of the 
highest statesmanship to know when the 
jewel of which Burke speaks is demanded, 
and to resolve that at any cost it shall not 
be sold. John Pym had it when he carried 
lip to the Lords the impeachment of Straf- 
ford. John Adams had it when he lifted 
the Continental Congress in his arms and 
hurled it over the irrevocable line of inde- 
pendence. Charles Sumner had it when, at 
the close of his first great speech in the Sen- 
ate, he exclaimed, in the face of slavery in 
its highest seat, " By the Constitution which 
I have sworn to support, I am bound to dis- 
obey this act." Until that moment slavery 
had not seen in public life the man whom it 
truly feared. But now, amazed, incredulous, 



appalled, it felt that it had met its master. 
Here was a spirit as resolute and haughty 
as its own, with resources infinitely richer. 
Here at last was the North, the American 
conscience, the American will — the heir of 
the traditions of English Magna Charta, and, 
far beyond them, of the old Swiss cantons 
high on the heaven-kissing Alps — the spirit 
that would not wince, nor compromise, nor 
bend, but which, like a cliff of adamant, said 
to the furious sea, "Here shall thy proud 
waves be stayed." 

Ten years afterward, when States were 
seceding and preparing to secede — when the 
reluctant mind of the North began to see 
that war was possible — when even many of 
Mr. Sumner's and Mr. Seward's party friends 
trembled in dismay, Mr. Seward ended his 
last speech in the Senate, a guarded plea for 
the Union, by concessions which amazed 
many of his most earnest friends. I know 
that he thought it the part of a wise states- 
manship that he who was to be the head of 
the new administration should retain if pos- 
sible the support of the opposition of the 
North by shunning every thing like menace, 
and by speaking in the most temperate and 
conciliatory tone. But his mournful con- 
cluding words, "I learned early from Jeffer- 
son that in political affairs we can not al- 
ways do what seems to us absolutely best," 
sounded at that time and under those cir- 
cumstances like a mortal cry of defeat aud 
surrender. And at the very time that Mr. 
Seward was speaking those words, Mr. Sum- 
ner was one evening surprised by a visit in 
Washington from a large number of the 
most conspicuous citizens of Boston, all of 
whom had been among his strongest and 
most positive political opponents. He wel- 
comed them gravely, seeing that their pur- 
pose was very serious, and after a few mo- 
ments the most distinguished member of the 
party made an impassioned appeal to the 
Senator. " You know us all," he said, " as 
fellow-citizens of yours who have always 
and most strongly regretted and opposed 
your political course. But at this awful 
moment, when the country hangs upon the 
edge of civil war — and what civil war means 
you know — we believe that there is one man 
only who can avert the threatening calam- 
ity, one man whom the North really trusts, 
and by whoso counsels it will be guided. 
We believe that you are that man. The 
North will listen to you and to no other, and 
we are here in the name of humanity and 
civilization to implore yon to save your 
country." The speaker was greatly affect- 
ed, and after a moment Mr. Sumner said : 
"Sir, I am surprised that you attribute to 
me such influence. I will, however, assume 
it. Bo it so. What, then, is it that ydu 
would have me do?" "We implore you, 
Mr. Sumner, as you love your country and 
your God, to vote for the Crittenden compro- 
mise." " Sir," said Charles Sumner, rising 
to his lofty height, and never more Charles 
Sumner than in that moment, " if what you 



10 



say is indeed true, and if at this moment the 
North trusts me, as you think, heyond all 
others, it is hecause the North knows that 
under no circumstances -whatever would I 



compromise. 

It was precisely hecause slavery recognized 
this when he made his first important speech, 
and felt for the first time the immense force 
behind his words, that I call that speech 
so significant an event. I do not claim for 
Sumner deeper convictions or a sterner will 
than those of many of his associates. But 
the Abolitionists, however devoted and elo- 
quent, were only private citizens and agita- 
tors who abjured political methods. They 
seemed to the supreme influence in the gov- 
ernment a band of pestilent fanatics. But 
Charles Surnuer in the Senate, Charles Sum- 
ner in the seat of Daniel Webster, saying 
that the Constitution forbade him to obey 
the Fugitive Slave Law, was not an indi- 
vidual; he was a representative man. No 
meeting of enthusiastic men and women in 
a school-house had sent him to the Senate, 
but the Legislature of a State. Nor that 
alone, for that Legislature had not sent him 
as the representative of a party, but of an 
idea — an idea which had been powerful 
enough to hold its friends close together 
through a contest of three months, and at 
last defeating the influences which had so 
long controlled unquestioned the politics of 
the State, had lifted into the Senate a man 
pledged only to cry Delenda est Carthago, and 
who, by the law of his mental and moral 
structure, could no more compromise the 
principle at stake than he could tell a lie. 
Still further, slavery heard the young Sena- 
tor proudly assert that the Constitution 
did not recognize slavery, except in the 
slave-trade clause, whose force was long 
since spent ; that the clause upon which the 
Fugitive Law was grounded was a mere com- 
pact conferring no power, and that every 
detail of the process provided was flagrantly 
and palpably unconstitutional. Slavery, he 
insisted, was sectional, liberty was nation- 
al ; and throwing this popular cry to the 
country, he irradiated his position with so 
splendid an illumination of illustration, 
precedent, argument, appeal, that it shone 
all over the land. How like a sunrise it 
strengthened and stimulated and inspired 
the North! It furnished the quiver of a 
thousand orators and newspapers, and was 
an exhaustless treasury of resources for the 
debate. Above all, it satisfied men bred in 
reverence of law that their duty as citizens 
was coincident with the dictates of their 
consciences, and that the Constitution justi- 
fied them in withstanding the statute which 
their souls loathed. 

This was the very service that the coun- 
try needed at that time; and that no dra- 
matic effect should be wanting, as Henry 
Clay had left the Senate for the last time on 
the day that Mr. Sumner was sworn in, so, as 
he was making his first great plea for justice 
under the Constitution, his predecessor, Dan- 



iel Webster, then Secretary of State, came 
into the Chamber, and also for the last time. 
I know no more impressive scene. There 
is the old Senator, then the chief figure in 
America, who, a year before, on the 7th of 
March, had made his last speech supporting 
the policy of the Fugitive Slave Bill, and 
against the Wilmot Proviso. Worn, wasted, 
sad, with powers so great and public serv- 
ice so renowned, the Olympian man who 
had sought so long, so ably, so vainly, to pla- 
cate the implacable, his seventy years end- 
ing in baffled hopes and bitter disappoint- 
ment and a broken heart, gazed with those 
eyes of depthless melancholy upon his suc- 
cessor. And here stands that successor, with 
the light of spotless youth upon his face, 
towering, dauntless, radiant ; the indomita- 
ble Puritan, speaking as a lawyer, a states- 
man, and a man, not for his State alone, nor 
for his country only, but for human rights 
every where and always, forecasting the fu- 
ture, heralding the new America. As Web- 
ster looked and listened, did he recall the 
words of that younger man seven years be- 
fore in Faneuil Hall, when he prayed the 
party that Webster led to declare for eman- 
cipation ? Did he remember the impassion- 
ed appeal to himself, that as he had justly 
earned the title of Defender of the Constitu- 
tion, so now he should devote his marvelous 
powers to the overthrow of slavery, and 
thereby win a nobler name ? Alas ! it was 
demanding dawn of the sunset! It was be- 
seeching yesterday to return to-morrow. It 
was imploring Daniel Webster to be Charles 
Sumner. No, fellow-citizens, in that appeal 
Sumner forecast his own glory. " Assume, 
then," cried he, " these unperformed duties. 
The aged shall bear witness to you ; the 
young shall kindle with rapture as they re- 
peat the name of Webster ; the large com- 
pany of the ransomed shall teach their chil- 
dren and their children's children to the 
latest generation to call you blessed, and 
you shall have yet another title, never to be 
forgotten on earth or in heaven, Defender of 
Humanity." 

I dwell upon this first great speech of Mr. 
Sumner's in the Senate, because it illustrates 
his own public qualities and character, his 
aims and his methods. He began to take 
an official part in affairs when all questions 
were determined by a single interest, a sin- 
gle policy, aud all issues grew out of that. 
His nature was so transparent and simple, 
and the character of his relation to his time 
so evident, that there is but one story to tell. 
All his greater speeches upon domestic top- 
ics after that of August, 1852, were but am- 
plifications of the theme. The power that 
he had defied did not relax, but redoubled 
its efforts to subdue the country to its will, 
and every new attempt found Sumner with 
more practiced powers, with more compre- 
hensive resources, ready and eager for the 
battle. For the whole of his active career, 
before, during, and after the war, his work 
was substantially the same. He was essen- 



11 



tially art orator and a moral reformer, and 
with unsurpassed earnestness of appeal, em- 
phasized from first to last by the incalcu- 
lable weight of his commanding character, 
his work was to rouse and kindle and in- 
spire the public opinion of the country to 
his own uncompromising hostility to slavery. 
In this crusade he traversed the land, as it 
were, by his speeches, a new Peter the Her- 
mit, and by his sincerity, his uuconquerable 
zeal, his affluent learning, making history 
and literature and art tributary to his pur- 
pose, he entered the houses and hearts and 
minds of the people of the Northern States, 
and fanned the flame of a holy hatred of 
the intolerable and audacious wrong. It was 
indispensable to this work tbat he should 
not be able to admit any qualification of its 
absorbing necessity or any abatement of the 
urgency with which it must be pursued. 
Once in later days, when I argued with him 
that opponents might be sincere, and that 
there was some reason on the other side, he 
thundered in reply, " Upon such a question 
there is no other side !" The time required 
such a leader — a man who did not believe 
that there was another side to the question, 
who would treat difference of opinion almost 
as moral delinquency; and the hour found 
the man in Sumner. 

For see what the leadership of opinion in 
this country then demanded. In the first 
place, and for the reasons I have mention- 
ed — the instinct, traditions, and habits of 
the dominant race in our civilization — such 
a leader must be a man who showed that 
the great principles of liberty, but of liberty 
under law, of what we call regulated lib- 
erty, were on his side ; whose familiarity 
with the Constitution and with constitu- 
tional interpretation, and whose standing 
among lawyers who dealt with the compre- 
hensive spirit and purpose of the law, was 
recognized and commanding, so that, in- 
structed by him, the farmer in the field, the 
mechanic in the shop, the traveler by the 
way — all law-loving Americans every where, 
could maintain the contest with their neigh- 
bors point by point upon the letter of the 
Constitution, and show, or think they show- 
ed, that the supreme law in its intention, in 
the purpose of its authors, by the unquestion- 
able witness of the time, demanded an in- 
terpretation and a statute in favor of liberty. 
Then, in the second place, this leader must 
be identified with a political party, for the 
same instinct which seeks the law and leans 
upon precedent acts through the organiza- 
tion of parties. The Free -soil sentiment 
that sent Sumner to the Senate was the real 
creative force in our politics at that time. 
It had a distinct organization in several 
States. It had nominated Presidential can- 
didates at Buffalo; and although the Whig 
and Democratic were still the great parties, 
the Free-soil principle was necessarily the 
nucleus around which a new and truly na- 
tional party must presently gather. In 1852 
the common enemy silenced the Whig party, 



which almost instantly dissolved as a pow- 
erful element in politics, and the Republican 
party arose. No man had done more to form 
the opinion and deepen the conviction from 
which it sprang than Sumner ; no man ac- 
cepted its aid with more alacrity, or saw 
more clearly its immense opportunity. As 
early as September, 1854, he declared in the 
State Convention of his political friends, 
"As Republicans we go forth to encounter 
f he oligarchs of slavery ;" and eighteen years 
afterward, in warning the party against 
what he thought to be a fatal course, ho 
said that he had been one of the straitest 
of the sect, who had never failed to sustain 
its candidates or to advance its principles. 
He was indeed one of its fathers. No cit- 
izen who has acted with that party will 
question the greatness of his service to it ; 
no citizen who opposed that party will deny 
it. The personal assault upon him in the 
Senate, following his prodigious defense of 
the Republican position and policy, and soon 
after the first national nominations of the 
party, made him throughout the inspiring 
summer of 1856, to the imagination of the 
twelve hundred thousand men who voted 
for its candidates, the very type and illus- 
tration of their hope and purpose. Nothing 
less thau such humanity in the national pol- 
icy ami such lofty character in public life 
as were expressed by the name of Charles 
Sumner was the aim of the great political 
awakening of that time. The rank and file 
of the party, to borrow a military phrase, 
dressed upon Sumner ; and long afterward, 
when party differences had arisen, I am sure 
that I spoke for the great body of his polit- 
ical associates when I said to one who in- 
dignantly regretted his course, that while 
at that time and under those circumstances 
we could not approve his judgment, jet 
there were thousands and thousands of men 
who would be startled aud confused to find 
themselves marching in a political campaign 
out of step with Charles Sumner. Thus he 
satisfied the second imperative condition of 
leadership of which I speak as a conspicuous 
and decided party chief. 

But there were certain modifications of 
these conditions essential to the position, 
and these also were found in Sumner. Such 
was the felicity of his career that even his 
defects of constitution served to equip him 
more fully for his task. Thus, while it was 
indispensable under the circumstances that 
he should be a constitutional and interna- 
tional lawyer, it was no less essential that 
his mind should deal more with principles 
than with details, and with the spirit rather 
than the letter. He saw so clearly the great 
end to be achieved that he seemed sometimes 
almost to assume the means. Like an Alpine 
guide leading his company of travelers to- 
ward the pure and awful heights, with his 
eye fixed upon their celestial beauty, and his 
soul breathing an 

" Ampler ether, a diviner air," 
he moved straight on, disdaining obstacles 



12 



that would have perplexed a guide less ab- 
solutely absorbed, and who by moments of 
doubt and hesitation would have imperiled 
every thing. 

Thus his legal mind, in the pursuit of a 
moral eud, had sometimes what I may call a 
happy lack of logic. Sure of his end, and 
that every thing ought to make for it, he 
felt that every thing did make for it. For 
instance, his first great public oration, upon 
the "True Grandeur of Nations," -was a most 
powerful presentation of the glory and beau- 
ty of peace, and a mighty denunciation of 
the horrors and wrongs of war. It was an 
intrepid and impressive discourse, and its 
influence will be deep and lasting. But it 
overstated its own case. It exposed the cit- 
izen soldier not only to ridicule, but to mor- 
al aversion. Aud yet the young men who sat 
in martial array before the orator had not 
submitted to military discipline merely for 
the splendor of a parade, but that in the sol- 
emn and exigent hour they might the more 
effectively defend the public safety and pri- 
vate honor, the school and the hospital, and 
social order itself, the only guarantee of 
peace, and all this not at the arbitrary com- 
mand of their own will, but by the lawful 
and considered word of the civil power. 
What is military force which he derided 
but, in the last resort, the law which he re- 
vered, in execution ? As a friend asked him, 
are the judgments of Story and of Shaw ad- 
vice merely ? Do they not, if need be, com- 
mand every bayonet in the State ? Is force 
wrong, and must the policeman not only be 
prohibited from carrying a pistol or a club, 
but must he be forbidden to lay his hand 
upon the thief in the act to compel him to 
the station ? The young citizen soldiers who 
sat before the orator were simply the ulti- 
mate police. To decry to them with resound- 
ing and affluent power the practice which 
covered war with a false lustre was a noble 
service, but to do it in a way that would 
forbid the just and lawful punishment of a 
murderer disclosed a defective logic. Thus 
Sumner sometimes used arguments that were 
two-edged swords, apt to wound the wielder 
as well as the enemy. And so he sometimes 
adopted propositions of constitutional or in- 
ternational law which led straight to his 
moral end, but which would hardly have en- 
dured the legal microscope. Yet he main- 
tained them with such fervor of conviction, 
such an array of precedent, such amplitude 
of illustration, that to the great popular 
mind, morally exalted like his own, his 
statements had the majesty and the conclu- 
siveness of demonstrations. 

And this, again, was what the time need- 
ed. The debate was essentially, although 
under the forms of law, revolutionary. It 
aimed at the displacement not only of an ad- 
ministration, but of a theory of the govern- 
ment and of traditional usage that did not 
mean to yield without a struggle. It re- 
quired, therefore, not the judicially logical 
mind, nor the fine touch of casuistry that 



splits and halts and defers until the cause 
is lost, but the mind so absolutely alive with 
the idea and fixed upon the end that it com- 
pels the means. John Pym was resolved 
that Strafford should be impeached, aud he 
found the law for it. Charles Sumner was 
resolved that slavery should fall, and he 
found the Constitution for it. When the 
great debate ended, and there was the mo- 
ment of dread silence before the outburst 
of civil war, the legal casuistry which had 
found the terrors of the Fugitive Slave Law 
constitutional could see no power in the 
Constitution to coerce States, Charles Sum- 
ner, who had found in the Constitution no 
authority for slave-hunting, answered the 
furious cauuonade at Fort Sumter by de- 
claring that slavery had legally destroyed 
itself, and by demanding immediate eman- 
cipation. 

Aud as the crisis in which Sumner lived 
required that in a leader the qualities of a 
lawyer should be modified by those of the 
patriot and the moralist, so it demanded 
that the party man should be more than a 
partisan. He never forgot that a party is a 
means, not an end. He knew the joy and 
the power of association — no mau better. He 
knew the history of parties every where — in 
Greece and Rome, in England and France, 
and in our own earlier day ; and he knew 
how insensibly a party comes to resemble 
an army, and an army to stand for the coun- 
try and cause which it has defended. But 
he knew above all that parties are kept pure 
and useful only by the resolute independ- 
ence of their members, and that those lead- 
ers whom, from their lofty principle and un- 
compromising qualities, parties do not care 
to nominate are the very leaders who make 
parties able to elect their candidates. The 
Republican party was organized to with- 
stand slavery when slavery dared all. It 
needed, therefore, one great leader at least 
who was not merely a partisan, who did not 
work for party ends, but for the ends of the 
party. It needed a man absorbed and mas- 
tered by hostility to slavery; a man of one 
idea, like Columbus, with his whole soul 
trembling ever to the west, wearying courts 
and kings and councils with his single in- 
cessant and importunate plea, until he sail- 
ed over the horizon, and gave a New World 
to the Old ; a man of one idea, like Luther, 
pleading his private conscience against the 
ancient hierarchy, and giving both worlds 
religious liberty. Yes, a mau of one idea. 
This was what the time demanded in public 
and party life, and this it found in Charles 
Sumner; not an antislavery man only, but 
a man in whose soul for thirty years the sigh 
of the slave never ceased, and whose dying 
words were a prayer to save the bill that 
made that slave wholly an equal citizen. 

Wheu the Republican party came into 
power it was forced to conduct a war in 
which the very same qualities were demand- 
ed. The public mind needed constantly to 
be roused and sustained by the trumpet note 



/ 



13 



of an ever higher endeavor, and from no lead- 
er did it hear that tone more steadily and 
clearly than from Sumuer. When the most 
radical, which in such a moment is the wis- 
est, policy came to he discussed in detailed 
measures, he had already rohhed it of its ter- 
rors hy making it familiar. While Congress 
declared hy a vote almost unanimous that 
emancipation was not a purpose or an ele- 
ment of the war, Sumner proclaimed to the 
couutry that slavery was perpetual war, and 
that emancipation only was peace. Like 
Nelson in the hattle of the Baltic — when the 
admiral signaled to stop fighting he put the 
glass to his hlind eye and shouted, " I don't 
see the admiral's signal; nail my own colors 
to the mast for closer hattle!" As hefore 
the war, so while it raged, he felt the impe- 
rial necessity of the conclusion so strongly 
that he made all arguments serve, and forced 
all facts into line. He was alive with the 
truth that Dryden nohly expresses : " I have 
heard, indeed, of some virtuous persons who 
have ended unfortunately, hut never of any 
virtuous nation. Providence is engaged too 
deeply when the cause hecomes so general." 
Mr. Lincoln, who was a natural diplomatist, 
fortunately understood Mr. Sumuer. The 
President knew as well as the Senator that 
the war sprang from slavery. He had al- 
ready said that the house of the Union di- 
vided against itself could not stand. He 
knew as well as Sumner that slavery must 
he smitten. But he knew also that in his 
position he could not smite until puhlic 
opinion lifted his arm. To stimulate that 
opinion, therefore, was the most precious 
service to the President, to the country, and 
the world. Thus it was not the appeal to 
Lincoln, it was the appeal to puhlic opinion 
that was demanded. It was not Sumner's 
direct hut his reflected light that was so 
useful. And when the President at last 
raised his arm — -for he pulled no unripe 
fruit, and he did nothing until he thought 
the time had fully come — he kuew that the 
couutry was ready, and that no man more 
than Sumner had made it so. When the 
Assistant Secretary of State carried the en- 
grossed copy of the Emancipation Proclama- 
tion to Mr. Lincoln to sign, he had heen 
shaking hands all the morning, so that his 
writing was unsteady. He looked at it for 
a moment with his sadly humorous smile, 
and then said, " When jieople see that shaky 
signature they will say, ' See how uncertain 
he was.' But I was never surer of any thing 
in my life." 

But while Sumner righteously stimulated 
puhlic opinion during the war, not less on 
one memorahle occasion did he righteously 
moderate it. I once ventured to ask Mr. 
Seward what in his judgment was the dark- 
est hour of the war. He answered instant- 
ly, "The time that elapsed hetween my in- 
formally sending to Lord Lyons a draft of 
my reply in the T)-ent case and my hearing 
from him that it would he satisfactory." 
He thought it the darkest hour, hecause he 



knew that in that reply he had made the 
utmost concession that puhlic opinion would 
tolerate, and if it were not satisfactory, noth- 
ing remained hut war with England — a war 
which, Mr. Adams tells us, he thinks that 
the British government expected, and for 
which it had already issued naval instruc- 
tions. Mr. Sumuer, who was most friendly 
with Mr. Seward, was chairman of the Sen- 
ate Committee of Foreign Relations, and, 
next to his constant and inspiring conscious- 
ness that he was a Senator of Massachusetts, 
his position as the head of that committee 
was the pride and glory of his official life. 
Few men in the country have ever heen so 
amply fitted for it as he. From his youth 
he had heen a student of international law. 
He was master of its history and literature. 
It was his hope— surely a nohle amhition — 
to contribute to it something that might 
still further humanize the comity of nations. 
He was familiar with the current politics 
of the world, and he personally knew most 
of the distinguished foreign statesmen of his 
time. Ahove all, he hrought to his chair the 
lofty conviction expressed hy another master 
of international law, that "the same rules 
of morality which hold together men in fam- 
ilies, and which form families into common- 
wealths, also link together those common- 
wealths as memhers of the great society of 
mankind." He was very proud of that chair- 
manship ; and when, in the spring of 1871, 
upon the annual renewal of the committees 
of the Senate, his Repuhlican colleagues de- 
cided not to restore him to his chair, he felt 
degraded and humiliated hefore the country 
aud foreign powers. He had held it for ten 
years. His party was still in the ascendant. 
His qualifications were undeniahle. And he 
felt that the refusal to restore him implied 
some deep distrust or dissatisfaction, for 
which, whatever good reasons existed, none 
hut the pleasure of the Senate has yet been 
given to the country. 

While he was still chairman, and at a crit- 
ical moment, the seizure of the Trent was 
hailed with frantic applause. Nothing seem- 
ed less likely than that an administration 
could stand which should restore the prison- 
ers, and Mr. Seward's letter was one of the 
ahlest and most skillful that he ever wrote. 
Mr. Adams says frankly that in his judg- 
ment it saved the unity of the nation. But 
the impressive fact of the moment was the 
acquiescence of the country in the surren- 
der, and that in great degree was due to the 
conclusive demonstration made hy Mr. Sum- 
ner that fidelity to our own principles re- 
quired the surrender. It was precisely one 
of the occasions when his value as a public 
man was plainly evident. From the crowd- 
ed diplomatic gallery in the Senate attent- 
ive Europe looked and listened. His words 
were weighed one by one by men whom 
sympathy with his cause did not seduce, nor 
a too susceptible imagination betray, and 
who acknowledged when he ended not only 
that the nation had escaped war, and that 



\ 



14 



the action of the administration had been 
vindicated, Imt that the renown of the conn- 
try had been raised by the clear and lumi- 
nous statement of its humane and peaceful 
traditions of neutrality. "Until to-day," 
said one of the most accomplished of those 
diplomatists, ''I have considered Mr. Sum- 
ner a doctrinaire ; henceforth I recognize 
him as a statesman." He had silenced En- 
gland by her historic self. He had justi- 
fied America by her own honorable prece- 
dent. The country knew that he spoke from 
the fullest knowledge, and with the loftiest 
American and humane purpose, and his serv- 
ice in promoting national acquiescence in 
the surrender of the captives was as char- 
acteristic as in nerving the public mind to 
demand emancipation. 

But while Mr. Simmer's public career was 
chiefly a relentless warfare with slavery, it 
was only because slavery was the present 
and palpable form of that injustice with 
which his nature was at war. The spring 
of his public life was that overpowering 
love of peace and justice and equality which 
spoke equally in his early Prison Discipline 
debates ; in the Fourth of July oration in 
Boston; in his literary addresses; in the 
powerful ant isla very speeches in the Sen- 
ate ; in his advocacy of emancipation as the 
true policy of the war, and of equal civil and 
political rights as the guarantee of its re- 
sults; in his Senatorial efforts to establish 
arbitration ; in his condemnation of priva- 
teering, prize-money, and letters of marque ; 
in his arraignment of Great Britain for a pol- 
icy which favored slavery; in his unflinch- 
ing persistence for the Civil Eights Bill; in 
his last great protest against the annexa- 
tion of San Domingo, and his denunciation 
of what he thought a cruel and un-American 
hostility to the republic of Hayti. He was 
a born warrior with public injustice. 

Many public men permit their hostility to 
a wrong to be modified in its expression by 
personal feeling, and to reflect that good 
men, from the influence of birth and train- 
ing, may sometimes support a wrong sys- 
tem. But Sumner saw in his opponents not 
persons, but a cause, and, like Socrates, in the 
battle he smote to the death, but with no per- 
sonal hostility. In turn he was so identifled 
with his own cause that he seemed to his op- 
ponents to be the very spirit with which they 
contended, visible, aggressive, arrogant. His 
tone in debate when he arraigned slavery, 
although he arraigned slavery alone, was so 
unsparing that all its supporters felt them- 
selves to be personally insulted. After the 
war began I heard his speech in the Senate 
for the expulsion of Mr. Bright, of Indiana, 
for commerce with the enemy. It was a 
lash of scorpions. Mr. Bright sat in his 
place pale and livid by turns, and gazing at 
Mr. Sumner as if he could scarce restrain 
himself from springing at his throat. Yet 
when the orator shook his lifted linger at 
his colleague, and hurled at him his scath- 
ing sentences, it was not the man that he 



saw before him : he saw only the rebellion, 
only slavery in arms, with Catilinian au- 
dacity proudly thrusting itself into the Cap- 
itol, and daring to sit in the very Senate- 
chamber. But Mr. Sumner's attitude and 
tone that day, with a vast majority at his 
side, with a friendly army in the city, were 
no bolder, no more resolutely defiant, than 
when he stood in the same chamber de- 
manding the expulsion of slavery from the 
statute-book, while the majority of his col- 
leagues would fain have silenced him, and 
the city was a camp of his enemies. 

It was often said that it was impossible 
he should know the peril of his position. 
It was not that. He did know it. But he 
saw and feared a greater peril — that of not 
doing his duty. He often stood practically 
alone among responsible public men. The 
spirit which begged Abraham Lincoln to 
strike out of his Springfield speech in 1858 
the words "a house divided against itself 
can not stand," a request which Mr. Lincoln 
said that he would carefully consider, and 
having considered, spoke the words, and 
went straight on to the Presidency and a 
glorious renown — this spirit censured Sum- 
ner's fanaticism, his devotion to oue idea ; 
derided his rhetoric, his false taste, his want 
of logic ; ridiculed his want of tact, his ig- 
norance of men, his visionary views, his im- 
practicability. Indeed, there were times 
when it ahnost seemed that friends joined 
with foes to shear Samson's flowing hair 
while Samson was smiting the Philistines. 
If friends remonstrated, he replied, "I am a 
public servant. I am a sentinel of my coun- 
try. I must cry ' halt,' though it be only a 
shadow that passes, and not bring my piece 
to a rest until I know who goes there." It 
was an ideal vigilance, an ideal sense of 
duty. I grant it. He was an ideal charac- 
ter. He loved duty more than friendship, 
and he had that supreme quality of man- 
hood, the power to go alone. I am not anx- 
ious to call him a statesman, but he seems 
to have measured more accurately than oth- 
ers the real forces of his time. Miss Marti- 
neau, in the remarkable paper published at 
the beginning of the war, says that every 
public man iu the country with whom she 
talked agreed that silence upon slavery was 
the sole condition of preserving the Union. 
Sumner was the man who saw that silence 
would make the Union only the stately tomb 
of liberty ; and that speech, constant, un- 
sparing, unshrinking — speech ringing oyer 
a cowering land like an alarm-bell at mid- 
night — was the only salvation of the Union 
as the home of freedom. 

If now for a moment we turn to survey 
that public career, extending over the thir- 
ty stormiest years of our history, the one 
clear, conspicuous fact that appears in it, 
after the single devotion to one end, is that 
Mr. Sumner lived to see that end accom- 
plished. He began by urging the Whig 
party to raise the antislavery standard. It 
refused. He left the party, and presently it 



15 



perished. He entered the Senate denoun- 
cing slavery in a manner that roused and 
strengthened the public mind for the contest 
that soon began. "With the first gun of the 
war he demanded emancipation as the way 
of victory ; and •when victory with emanci- 
pation came, he advocated equal suffrage as 
the security of liberty. What public man 
has seen more glorious fulfillments of his 
aims and efforts ? He did not, indeed, orig- 
inate the laws that enacted the results, but 
he developed the spirit and the conviction 
that made the results possible. William the 
Third won few battles, but he gained his 
cause ; Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declara- 
tion, but John Adams is the hero of Amer- 
ican independence. Sumner was more a 
moral reformer than a statesman, and to a 
surprising degree events were his allies. 
But no man of our first great period, not 
Otis or Patrick Henry, nor Jefferson or 
Adams, nor Hamilton or Jay, is surer of his 
place than in the second great period Charles 
Sumner is sure of his. 

As his career drew to an end, events oc- 
curred without which his life would not 
have been wholly complete, and the most 
signal illustration of the power of personal 
character in politics would have been lost. 
He was, as I have said, a party man. Al- 
though always in advance, and by his gen- 
ius a moral leader, he had yet always work- 
ed with and by his party. But as the main 
objects of his political activity were virtu- 
ally accomplished, he came to believe that 
his party, reckless in absolute triumph, was 
ceasing to represent that high and generous 
patriotism to which his life was consecrated, 
that its moral tone was sensibly declining, 
that it defended policies hostile to public 
faith and human rights, trusting leaders 
who should not be trusted, and tolerating 
practices that honest men should spurn. 
Believing that his party was forfeiting the 
confidence of the country, he reasoned with 
it and appealed to it, as more than twenty 
years before he had reasoned with the Whig 
party in Faneuil Hall. His hope was by 
his speeches on the San Domingo treaty and 
the French arms and the Presidential nomi- 
nation to shake what he thought to be the 
fatal apathy of the party, and to stimulate 
it once more to resume its leadership of the 
conscience and the patriotism of the coun- 
try. It was my fortune to see him con- 
stantly and intimately during those days, to 
know the persuasions and flatteries lavished 
upon him to induce him to declare openly 
against the party, and his resolution not to 
leave it until he had exhausted every argu- 
ment and prayer, and conscience forbade 
him to remain. That summons came, in his 
judgment, when a nomination was made 
which seemed to him the conclusive proof of 
a fatal party infatuation. "Any thing else," 
he said to me, vehemently, a hundred times 
— " any other candidacy I can support, and 
it would save the party and the country." 
The nomination was made. He did not hes- 



itate. He was sixty years old ; smitten with 
sorrows that were not known ; suffering at 
times acute agony from the disease of which 
he died; his heart heavy with the fierce 
strife of a generation, and longing for re- 
pose. But the familiar challenge of duty 
found him alert and watchful at his post, 
and he advanced without a doubt or a fear 
to what was undoubtedly the greatest trial 
of his life. 

The antislavery contest, indeed, had closed 
many a door and many a heart against him ; 
it had exposed him to the sneer, the hate, 
; the ridicule, of opposition ; it had threaten- 
ed his life and assailed his person. But the 
great issue was clearly drawn; his whole 
being was stirred to its depths ; he was iu 
the bloom of youth, the pride of strength ; 
| history and reason, the human heart and the 
human conscience, were his immortal allies, 
and around him were the vast, increasing 
I hosts of liberty ; the men whose counsels he 
approved ; the friends of his heart ; the mul- 
! titude that thought him only too eager for 
! unquestionable right ; the prayer of free men 
and women sustaining, inspiring, blessing 
him. But here was another scene, a far 
fiercer trial. His old companions in the Free- 
' soil days, the great abolition leaders, most 
of his warmest personal friends, the great 
I body of the party whom his words had in- 
spired, looked at him with sorrowful sur- 
, prise. Ah ! no one who did not know that 
proud and tender heart, trusting, simple, al- 
[ most credulous as that of a boy, could know 
how sore the trial was. He stood, among 
his oldest friends, virtually alone; with in- 
j expressible pain they parted, each to his own 
duty. " Are you willing," I said to him one 
j day, when he had passionately implored me 
i to agree with him — and I should have been 
unworthy his friendship had I been silent — 
" is Charles Sumner willing at this time, 
and in the circumstances of to-day, to in- 
| trust the colored race in this country, with 
all their rights, their liberty newly won and 
' yet flexile and nascent, to a party, however 
fair its profession, which comprises all who 
have hated and despised the negro ? The 
slave of yesterday in Alabama, in Carolina, 
in Mississippi, will his heart leap with joy 
or droop dismayed when he knows that 
Charles Sumner has given his great name 
as a club to smite the party that gave him 
and his children their liberty ?" The tears 
started to his eyes, that good gray head bow- 
ed down, but he answered, sadly, " I must do 
my duty." And he did it. He saw the proud, 
triumphant party that he had led so often, 
men and women whom his heart loved, the 
trusted Mends of a life, the sympathy and 
confidence and admiration upon which, on 
his great days and after his resounding words, 
he had been joyfully accustomed to lean — 
he saw all these depart, and he turned to 
go alone and do his duty. 

Yet, great as was his sorrow, still greater, 
as I believe, was his content in doing that 
duty. His State, indeed, could not follow 



16 



him. For the first time iu his life, he -went 
one way, and Massachusetts went the oth- 
er. But Massachusetts was as true to her 
convictions of duty in that hour as he was 
to his own. It was her profound belief 
that the result he sought would he perilous 
if not fatal to the welfare of the country. 
But the inspiring moral of these events is 
this, that while deploring his judgment in 
this single case, and while, later, the Legis- 
lature, misconceiving his noble and humane 
purpose, censured him for the resolutions 
which the people of the State did not under- 
stand, and which they believed, most un- 
justly to him, to be somehow a wrong to 
the precious dead, the flower of a thousand 
homes — yet, despite all this, the great heart 
of Massachusetts never swerved from Charles 
Sumner. It was grieved and amazed, and 
could not forego its own duty because he 
saw another. But I know that when in that 
year I spoke in rural Massachusetts, wheth- 
er in public or in private, to those who, with 
me, could not follow him, nothing that I said 
was heard with more sympathy and applause 
than my declaration of undying honor and 
gratitude to him. "I seem to lean on the 
great heart of Massachusetts," he said, in the 
bitterest hour of the conflict of his life. And 
it never betrayed him. In that heart not 
the least suspicion of a mean or selfish mo- 
tive ever clouded his image — not a doubt 
of his absolute fidelity to his conscience dis- 
turbed its faith; and had he died a year 
ago, while yet the censure of the Legislature 
was unrepealed, his body would have been 
received by you with the same affectionate 
reverence ; here, and in Faneuil Hall, and 
at the State-house, all honor that boundless 
gratitude and admiration could lavish would 
have been poured forth, and yonder iu 
Mount Auburn he would have been laid to 
rest with the same immense tenderness of 
sorrow. 

This is the great victory, the great lesson, 
the great legacy of his life, that the fidelity 
of a public man to conscience, not to party, 
is rewarded with the sincerest popular love 
and confidence. What an inspiration to 
every youth louging with generous ambition 
to enter the great arena of the state, that he 
must heed first and always the divine voice 
in his own soul, if he would be sure of the 
sweet voices of good fame! Living, how 
Sumner served us! and dying, at this mo- 
ment how he serves us still ! In a time when 
politics seem peculiarly mean and selfish and 
corrupt, when there is a general vague appre- 
hension that the very moral foundations of 
the national character are loosened, when 



good men are painfully anxious to know 
whether the heart of the people is hardened, 
Charles Sumner dies; and the universality 
and sincerity of sorrow, such as the death of 
no man left living among us could awaken, 
show how true, how sound, how generous, is 
still the heart of the American people. This is 
the dying service of Charles Sumner, a reve- 
lation which inspires every American to bind 
his shiniug example as a frontlet between 
the eyes, and never again to despair of the 
higher and more glorious destiny of his coun- 
try. 

And of that destiny what a foreshowing 
was he ! In that beautiful home at the sun- 
ny and leafy corner of the national city, 
where he lived among books and pictures 
and noble friendships and lofty thoughts — 
the home to which he returned at the close 
of each day in the Senate, and to which the 
wise and good from every land naturally 
came — how the stately and gracious and all- 
accomplished man seemed the very persojii- 
fication of that new union for which he had 
so manfully striven, and whose coming his 
dying eyes beheld — the union of ever wider 
liberty and juster law, the America of com- 
prehensive intelligence, and of moral pow- 
er! For that he stands ; up to tbat his im- 
perishable memory, like the words of his 
living lips, forever lifts us — lifts us to his 
own great faith in America and in man. 
Suddenly from his strong baud — my father, 
my father, the chariot of Israel, and the 
horsemen thereof! — the banner falls. Be it 
ours to grasp it, and carry it still forward, 
still higher! Our work is not his work, 
but it can be well done only in his spirit. 
And as in the heroic legend of your western 
valley the men of Hadley, faltering in the 
fierce shock of Indian battle, suddenly saw 
at their head the lofty form of an unknown 
captain, with white hair streaming on the 
wind, by his triumphant mien strengthen- 
ing their hearts and leading them to victo- 
ry, so, men and women of Massachusetts, of 
America, if in that national conflict already 
begun, as vast and vital as the struggle of 
his life, the contest which is beyond that of 
any party, or policy, or measure — the con- 
test for conscience, intelligence, and moral- 
ity as the supreme power in our politics and 
the sole salvation of America — you should 
falter or fail, suddenly your hearts shall see 
once more the towering form, shall hear 
again the inspiring voice, shall be exalted 
with the moral energy and faith of Charles 
Sumner, and the victories of his immortal 
example shall transcend the triumphs of his 
life. 






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